Sunlight Foundation's new tool tracks copy-pasta.

"Churnalism" is a term for the practice of journalists publishing press releases verbatim, or almost verbatim, rather than writing original copy. A few years ago, UK organization Media Standards Trust created an online tool, churnalism.com, that allows users to compare text to a database of articles from UK national newspapers, the BBC, and so on, to see whether or not those media outlets are simply copying and pasting. Great for consumers of UK media, but churnalism is a global problem. Thanks to a collaboration between the Sunlight Foundation and the Media Standards Trust, consumers of US news now have a similar resource, Churnalism US.

The developers at Sunlight have created a database of press releases from clearing houses like EurekAlert and MarketWire as well as from RSS feeds that capture PR from Fortune 500 companies, important non-profits and think tanks, trade organizations, Congressional offices, and also Wikipedia. Users can enter URLs or pasted text into Churnalism (or install a browser extension) at which point the text of the article is hashed and compared to the database for matches. By using sliding windows of hashes, SuperFastMatch (yes, that name is awesome) lets Churnalism US narrow down rapidly on possible matches, at which point the front end takes over and analyzes the similarities. Does the news post have the same quote? Are there giant blocks of identical text? And so on. In addition to identifying straight copy-paste jobs, Churnalism US should also be able to highlight cases where quotes have been selectively edited or used without context.

Sunlight’s goal with Churnalism US is to let us track the influence of ideas throughout the media, and the approach the US tool takes seems a little more intuitive and user-friendly than the UK version, which compares user-entered press releases to a database of news articles. But by including EurekAlert in its database, Sunlight also created a tool that will help draw more attention to the churnalism that seems to be endemic in science writing, where you’re more likely than ever to come across a barely altered press release masquerading as science journalism. It was this problem that actually inspired me to start writing Science.Ars back in 2004, where I took what seemed to be a novel step in only writing about something once I’d read the actual paper, a practice we continue to this day (and one that others, such as the research blogging movement, have also adopted).

What the tool probably won’t help with is another plague affecting online journalism wherein sites simply claim others’ original work as their own. Sometimes this is done with an agenda in mind, as in the recent case of Anil Potti and his attempts at reputation management following what appears to be extensive research fraud. But often it’s just unscrupulous content thieves looking to get some pageviews off the sweat of someone else’s brow.

Hmmm, I thought that was the purpose of a press release? Most news outlets even require the press release to be written in the third person so they can easily "adapt" it to a news post. I think the bigger problem is when a news outlet lifts original material from other journalists and reposts it like those pesky aggregators.

Hmmm, I thought that was the purpose of a press release? Most news outlets even require the press release to be written in the third person so they can easily "adapt" it to a news post. I think the bigger problem is when a news outlet lifts original material from other journalists and reposts it like those pesky aggregators.

If it's identified as/made clear that it's a press release, that's all well and good, since that least gives you some hint that it might be, shall we say, less than impartial about its topic. The problem is when it's presented as an actual independently written/researched article, which isn't as uncommon as one might think.

Now it should be easier to find and litigate against the thieves. Excellent! :-)

Although addressed at the end of the article, that's not really what this is about.

Anyway, that this activity goes on isn't at all news to me, but it's good for people to learn how they're being deceived. Back in 2006 I learned, in a college history course I think, that this is the common practice of literally every. single. newspaper. in the United States, with the exceptions of The Washington Post, the NYT, the Wallstreet Journal and a couple other high-profile newspapers run by actual journalists. Every other newspaper prints press releases verbatim, or nearly verbatim, and calls it 'journalism' (with the exception of local reporting).

This does a great disservice to the public, as they're being fed heavily biased information straight from the PR departments of various corporations and organizations. Unfortunately, this practice will continue until the newspapers all die out, as they just don't have the money to do real journalism.

After reading the article, am I the only one who wants to read more about Tetris fixing lazy-eye?

I have to admit to being curious about that one myself since I actually have a lazy eye.

I have an under-achieving eye. It wanders over to the side when I'm really tired but when I need to track something it snaps into proper position. However, it would be nice to be able to play some tetris and have it bring an end to questions like "what are you looking at?" and "how did you make your eyes do that?" when I'm speaking to people toward the end of the day.

This does a great disservice to the public, as they're being fed heavily biased information straight from the PR departments of various corporations and organizations. Unfortunately, this practice will continue until the newspapers all die out, as they just don't have the money to do real journalism.

Yeah, but it's not like web-based media will be (or has been) any better in that regard. I wouldn't lay all the blame on "newspapers" per se, it's just media in general be it print or electronic.

Hmmm, I thought that was the purpose of a press release? Most news outlets even require the press release to be written in the third person so they can easily "adapt" it to a news post. I think the bigger problem is when a news outlet lifts original material from other journalists and reposts it like those pesky aggregators.

The problem isn't protecting the poor, poor, PR flacks(as you note, they get paid to write stuff that gets into the papers as widely and fully as possible); but to throw some light on the hack 'journalists' who are essentially slapping their names, and the implicit credibility of a 3rd party observer, onto hagiographic first-party spin.

After reading the article, am I the only one who wants to read more about Tetris fixing lazy-eye?

I have to admit to being curious about that one myself since I actually have a lazy eye.

I have an under-achieving eye. It wanders over to the side when I'm really tired but when I need to track something it snaps into proper position. However, it would be nice to be able to play some tetris and have it bring an end to questions like "what are you looking at?" and "how did you make your eyes do that?" when I'm speaking to people toward the end of the day.

I work in the film business and surprisingly (?) know a disproportionate amount of people with the same condition.I've had both my eyes operated on for wandering eye. One when i was quite young and the other in my late teens. My left (the second operation) still drifts especially when tired and is also very short sighted and I have had pretty consistent double vision most of my life which my brain has generally become quite adept at ignoring with only the occasional bizarre hallucination resulting. There is one friend in high school who for some reason my eyes would spilt when looking at his face and to this day i really have no idea what he looks like.But my favorite story is the one about the second operation and I'm gonna share it with you now, the thing is they perform the main operation (which consists of detaching the muscles that move yir eye so they can be reattached to correct the drift) under general anathesia but of course when yir knocked out yir eyes tend to roll up into yir head and so the don't permanently reattach them just yet. The next morning the place you in a clockwork orange device clipping yir eyelids open and untie the slip knots, make you stare at a laser dot on wall, then stand directly infront of it and indivisually re sew each muscle. Some thing like 16 muscles with roughly nine stitches each? With you strapped in a chair, eyelids clipped open as some guy with rather large fingers sticks a needle in yir eye over and over again. Your vision actually distorts each time the needle goes in as yir eyeball flexes. The most distinctive thing i remember is that they numbed the surface of your eye of course with drops but each time they tug a muscle into place it tugs on the optic nerve which is conected to yir brain, ... And i swear you can feel yir brain moving inside of yir skull ... And it doesn't feel quite, .. right.

IMO, reporters who copy from press releases should be put out in stocks during lunch hour (in the company cafeteria if one exists, else the nearest mall food court) but ones who do "research" via WP deserve much worse.

Semi-confession: I have abused citogenesis, by adding privately-gained true information to WP, waiting until it was mentioned in a news article, then adding a ref tag.

After reading the article, am I the only one who wants to read more about Tetris fixing lazy-eye?

I have to admit to being curious about that one myself since I actually have a lazy eye.

I have an under-achieving eye. It wanders over to the side when I'm really tired but when I need to track something it snaps into proper position. However, it would be nice to be able to play some tetris and have it bring an end to questions like "what are you looking at?" and "how did you make your eyes do that?" when I'm speaking to people toward the end of the day.

I work in the film business and surprisingly (?) know a disproportionate amount of people with the same condition.I've had both my eyes operated on for wandering eye. One when i was quite young and the other in my late teens. My left (the second operation) still drifts especially when tired and is also very short sighted and I have had pretty consistent double vision most of my life which my brain has generally become quite adept at ignoring with only the occasional bizarre hallucination resulting. There is one friend in high school who for some reason my eyes would spilt when looking at his face and to this day i really have no idea what he looks like.But my favorite story is the one about the second operation and I'm gonna share it with you now, the thing is they perform the main operation (which consists of detaching the muscles that move yir eye so they can be reattached to correct the drift) under general anathesia but of course when yir knocked out yir eyes tend to roll up into yir head and so the don't permanently reattach them just yet. The next morning the place you in a clockwork orange device clipping yir eyelids open and untie the slip knots, make you stare at a laser dot on wall, then stand directly infront of it and indivisually re sew each muscle. Some thing like 16 muscles with roughly nine stitches each? With you strapped in a chair, eyelids clipped open as some guy with rather large fingers sticks a needle in yir eye over and over again. Your vision actually distorts each time the needle goes in as yir eyeball flexes. The most distinctive thing i remember is that they numbed the surface of your eye of course with drops but each time they tug a muscle into place it tugs on the optic nerve which is conected to yir brain, ... And i swear you can feel yir brain moving inside of yir skull ... And it doesn't feel quite, .. right.

Just felt like sharing

This story is the stuff of nightmares. I think i'll just stick with the predictable double vision (which oddly enough seems to have no effect at all on my depth perception) and leave the surgery for if i feel particularly masochistic.

After reading the article, am I the only one who wants to read more about Tetris fixing lazy-eye?

Indeed, and looking at other comments it seems we do have a small community of lazyeyers here at Ars (yay I'm not weird!), but I'm more curious about who originally wrote the article shown in the picture... sciencedaily hasn't seemed so bad, so was it EurekaAlert?

After reading the article, am I the only one who wants to read more about Tetris fixing lazy-eye?

Indeed, and looking at other comments it seems we do have a small community of lazyeyers here at Ars (yay I'm not weird!), but I'm more curious about who originally wrote the article shown in the picture... sciencedaily hasn't seemed so bad, so was it EurekaAlert?

Sciencedaily writes almost no original content from what I can tell, they just copy-paste press releases straight from EurekAlert. The press release in the example used above was written by McGill University (the original source is the right-hand column).

The word "churnalism" was, according to wikipedia, coined by "BBC journalist Waseem Zakir" but I first heard it in Nick Davies' excellent book Flat Earth News. Again to quote wikipedia:

Quote:

In his book Flat Earth News, the British journalist Nick Davies reported a study at Cardiff University by Professor Justin Lewis and a team of researchers which found that 80% of the stories in Britain's quality press were not original and that only 12% of stories were generated by reporters.

Also his insights into media moguls like Rupert Murdoch were fascinating.

I'm actually surprised this hadn't been done already--or if done, not marketed so well. This sort of thing is already used by educational institutions to detect rampant plagiarism, and the techniques are well-understood (for starters, just grab any reasonably-sized snippet of a term paper and do an exact phrase search on Google). I actually warned a certain relative about that when he asked me to review a college entrance essay he'd done, and I noticed that he'd forgotten to make his fonts consistent after copy-pasting. Unfortunately he'd already submitted his essay, so the damage was done.

20+ years ago, during my time on the help desk of a major american newspaper (hint: they like graphs!) one of my late night\early morning duties was to move back to the newsroom and type news stories into the computer.

The instructions were to basically sit and watch the AP feed and TV news stations and enter the story into the computer, changing the structure just enough so that it wasn't blatantly obvious plagiarism. There were 15-20 of us back there at any given point. They called us "editors".

I guarantee that somewhere, some other poor schmuck was watching our feed and dutifully typing what he read into another computer to be re-read and regurgitated by the guy after him.

I wonder, whether they are going to include in the Churnalism database the talking points memos daily sent by the White House to all the mainstream media, so we can see how it can happen, that everyone used the phrase, "this adds gravitas to the ticket," when presidential candidate George W. Bush picked Dick Cheney as his running mate.

The two in the picture are like that every day. (Physorg is only marginally better - or perhaps I just don't go to their sources as often.) Paraphrasing half the crowd: To be fair, these are mere aggregators; it’s all we expect or ask of them. To be slightly less charitable, I use and demand so little of them because most news outlets don’t understand these things, and their articles contribute nothing or get parts wrong. If we can't get a copy or take the time to read the pub itself, a press release is closer to the source by at least one layer.

Hmmm, I thought that was the purpose of a press release? Most news outlets even require the press release to be written in the third person so they can easily "adapt" it to a news post. I think the bigger problem is when a news outlet lifts original material from other journalists and reposts it like those pesky aggregators.

This was my thought after reading on PAR that publishers feed and want websites to simply republish their press release and link to their exclusive partner details.

But as made clear as the next comments that writers altering releasing and wording their article to make it read like original work.

Great, comparing news articles to each other to find copyright infringements...

Do people have so much time on there hand to really look this up and then feel better about themselves because they read the "original" story?

Most people read articles to learn about a event or subject, not to question the information or source.

I'm sorry but there is a difference between a press release and journalism, and I am sorry that you don't recognize that fact.

And it's not about reading the 'original story,' it's about journalists passing off uncritical press releases as objective reporting, or straight up copy-paste jobs from Wikipedia. It's also about seeing how quotes get taken and used out of context. Since none of that stuff seems important to you I'm surprised you find our content here at Ars Technica worth your time.